Since I missed my connection with Lancy this morning, I decided to go east instead of west in the Wetland Park and explore new territory. I was running late due to getting distracted by what I thought might have been a Black Drongo near the bus stop and wandering off to try and verify it. No joy.
First of all I should say that trying to direct someone without being onhand at the Panjin Wetlands Park is really difficult since the Google map doesn't even look remotely like the reality. Also in the last 20 years I have never found anywhere in China that you could get accurate maps showing any detail. The best I have is an old Nelles paper map of North East China from 2009 that is too coarse on detail and too out of date to help on local navigation. Plus the map names more often than not don't match with the common local names. For instance the Shangtaizi He is commonly called the Lao He locally. Today's outing was typical. After getting home it took great effort to try and figure out where I had been on Google.
All that aside, it was an interesting outing. I ended up going all the way around the east end of the lake. The usual
Black-Headed Gull were in the majority, but I did find a few
Common Tern, one
Little Tern and a mystery that even the ID forum is passing on so far. A tern with a very dark body, almost pure black. Unfortunately, every shot I took of them was blurred or not in focus. Very quick moving with sudden changes in direction. I'll post them following this and maybe someone here can ID them.
The
Black-Crowned Night Heron were poaching fish from the nets stretched across the lake and I managed a decent pic of a
Purple Heron as he flushed and then dropped back down into cover. A few
Little Egret were showing their yellow toes on a bar in the middle of the river along with numerous gull and tern.
A few
Chestnut-Flanked White Eye Were hiding in the cover of the recently leafed out trees, but I managed to get one to peek out long enough to ID it.
I had one other mystery with what I first took to be a Purple Martin mixed with some Barn Swallow. It hovered on the wind right over me briefly and just as it dawned on me, "Wait a minute, Purple Martin in China?" it broke away and disappeared. Basically swallow like, maybe a little bigger and what I could only describe as purple all over. No pic as it didn't occur to me that it was odd until just as it disappeared.
Panjin Wetland Park, Liaoning, CN
May 18, 2018 9:45 AM - 1:45 PM
Protocol: Traveling
5.0 kilometer(s)
17 species
Ring-necked Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) 1
Great Crested Grebe (Podiceps cristatus) 4
Purple Heron (Ardea purpurea) 1
Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) 8
Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) 10
Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) 30
Little Tern (Sternula albifrons) 1
Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) 10
Oriental Cuckoo (Cuculus optatus) 1
Brown Shrike (Lanius cristatus) 4
Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) 30
Red-rumped Swallow (Cecropis daurica) 3
Light-vented Bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis) 3
Yellow-browed Warbler (Phylloscopus inornatus) 6
Oriental Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus orientalis) 50
Chestnut-flanked White-eye (Zosterops erythropleurus) 2
Eurasian Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus) 10
View this checklist online at
https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S45788336